The accurate capture and detection of moving objects with video cameras that are mounted on a moving platform is highly desirable in several types of applications. Such applications include ground or low altitude air vehicles (manned or unmanned) that need to detect moving objects in the operating environment; automatic detection of potential targets/threats that pop-up or move into view for military vehicles and altering an operator of a vehicle to these potential threats; and safe operation of (unmanned) ground vehicles, where there is a need to detect moving and stationary pedestrians/dismounted personnel in order to prevent accidents. Detection of independently moving targets from a moving ground vehicle is challenging due to the strong parallax effects caused by camera motion close to the 3D structure in the environment of the vehicle.
A warfighter crew operating a military vehicle in an urban environment is exposed to numerous threats from all directions. A distributed aperture camera system can provide the vehicle crew with continuous, closed-hatch 360-degree situational awareness of the immediate surroundings. However, it is difficult for an operator of the military vehicle to simultaneously and manually monitor an entire array of cameras and sensors. It would be desirable to have automatic, continuous, closed-hatch hemispherical situational awareness of the immediate surroundings for the vehicle occupants while on the move. This would enhance the crew's ability to drive/navigate while under the protection of armor and provide them with the relative location of the vehicle and target bearing relative to that vehicle using passive sensing. (Passive sensing refers to anything that does not project light or any type of energy in a scene. Reflected light is received in a camera from an object in passive sensing as opposed to active sensing such as radar wherein electromagnetic waves are sent to and reflected from a scene and the return signal is measured. Passive sensing is thus more covert and therefore more desirable).
A technology that can provide automatic detection of moving objects for a video platform that is itself moving is known as Moving Target Indication On The Move (MTI-OTM). Forms of MTI developed in the prior art for use in a moving vehicle have been previously demonstrated using global parametric transformations for stabilizing the background. This technique has failed in situations in which static 3D structure in the scene displays significant parallax. For a ground vehicle, the parallax induced by the 3D structure on the ground cannot be ignored. The MTI approach should be able to distinguish between image motion due to parallax and motion due to independently moving objects. Other approaches for MTI detections from a moving platform use stereo to recover the 3D structure of the scene and find image regions where the frame-to-frame motion is inconsistent with the scene structure. The detection range for these approaches is limited by the distance at which reliable rang estimates can be obtained from stereo optics (determined by camera focal length and resolution and stereo baseline). Furthermore, for actual systems that need to provide 360 degree coverage, a solution using monocular cameras is attractive since the number of cameras required is half that for a panoramic stereo system. A practical algorithm needs to be able to handle the full range of natural environments, from planar scenes to ones with sparse 3D parallax and up to scenes with dense 3D parallax (Sparse 3D parallax refers to scenes where there are just a few things that protrude from a ground plane. Dense 3D parallax refers to environments such as a forest or a narrow street where the structure is very rich).
Accordingly, what would be desirable, but has not yet been provided, is a system and method for effectively and automatically detecting and reporting moving objects in situations where the video capturing platform is itself moving , thereby inducing parallax in the resulting video.